A Lesson in Thorns

by Sierra Simone

  And yet he still longed for it. He still dreamed of it as it was on the day of the wedding, and he still dreamed of his friends, of Rebecca and Delphine, whom he saw often in the waking world, but never in the same unfettered, near-wild environment they’d had that summer. He dreamed of Becket, too, clever and annoying, and St. Sebastian, whom he’d once kissed as torn flower petals and rain dropped onto their faces.

  He dreamed of Proserpina the most often and the most vividly. They met at the altar in his dreams and they rambled around Thornchapel’s forests and broken stone circles and hidden dolmens. They kissed too, and they held hands, and as he got older, the dreams grew both darker and richer, the place where he could be every bleak and tender thing he wanted to be. Sometimes it was him and St. Sebastian, sometimes it was him and Proserpina, and sometimes it was all six of them, doing things that made him blush the next time he’d see Delphine and Rebecca in real life.

  He dreamed and he burned.

  Thornchapel waited.

  And in a clearing in the woods, in a church ruined by thorns and time, something stirred.

  Something called all six of them by name.

  Chapter 1

  Twelve years later

  Everything is possible.

  Thornchapel waits at the end of my journey, and everything is possible.

  My cab wends west on an asphalt ribbon surrounded by stretches of snow-dusted moor. Granite tors frown down; the occasional clump of sheep gnaws on frostbitten grass. It’s all white and brown and dead and cold, and it’s so different from how I feel, from the things I normally crave—which are green and restless and alive—that I’m fascinated by it. I’m in love with it.

  I already want more of it.

  I look down at the paper I pulled from my coat pocket after the initial small talk with the driver faded away. The paper hasn’t changed since it arrived in my apartment’s mailbox last week—the day before I accepted a job offer I would’ve never been able to refuse—but I can’t stop staring at it. Like if only I look hard enough, it’ll make sense.

  But nothing has made sense for the last twelve years of my life. The world cracked open the day I married two boys at Thornchapel’s altar . . . or maybe it cracked open before that, on the day my parents brought me to Thornchapel in the first place.

  Certainly it was already cracked open by the time my mother disappeared from my life forever.

  The envelope was postmarked December 21st—the date of my twenty-second birthday—and it was stamped by the Exeter Mail Centre, although the postcode was for Thornchapel, that ancient house tucked deep into a wooded Dartmoor valley. It had been gently battered from its trip over the sea, creased as the uncaring mailman shoved it in the narrow rectangle of my shared mailbox. Not that it mattered—the envelope only contained a single paper, and on that paper, a single word.

  Convivificat.

  It’s Latin, and I don’t speak Latin, but the benefit of being a librarian at a university is that I know many people who do. Within an hour of firing off an email, I had a translation.

  It quickens.

  It quickens.

  I didn’t know what that meant. I still don’t.

  I mean, I know what the word quicken conveys in the dictionary sense; I whispered its synonyms as I went about my business that evening, as if that would help me understand.

  It stirs, it awakens, it comes to life . . .

  But what was stirring? What was coming to life?

  And that isn’t even the real mystery of the note, that isn’t even the real reason I said yes when Auden Guest’s lawyer called the next day and offered me a job. No, the real reason I agreed to leave my career and friends and country was because of the composition of the note itself.

  The handwriting—the sharp C, the narrow vs, the impatient but precise slice of every letter—it belongs to Adelina Kernstow Markham. A woman who’s been missing for twelve years.

  My mother.

  Down a steep wind of road, the village of Thorncombe opens into a disordered but still postcard-worthy cluster of thatched houses, pubs, and the stone St. Brigid’s-on-the-Moor with its massive bell tower at the front. There’s a small grocery store, a few restaurants, and a public library, and then at the edge of the village, a clutch of tired-looking houses all in various stages of molting their render and growing weeds in their driveways. Something about those houses tugs at a long-discarded memory, but I can’t dredge it up before we’re past them and piercing through ever-thickening woods, heading deeper into the valley toward our destination.

  And then we are over the narrow stone bridge and on the long, tree-pressed drive that leads to the house. When I came here as a child, arriving in the full flush of July green, the house was hidden by the leafy crowns of the trees, an edifice you could only take in entirely once you were standing right in front of it—or if you were at the back of the house, where the gardens seemed to stretch into infinity.

  But today, the bare winter trees do nothing to hide the house. Not the crenellated teeth of its fortified heart, nor the uncountable windows glittering from the Jacobean extension to the west. I can see the entire imposing sprawl of it as we approach—clustered chimneys and disordered gables, and the castle-worthy front doors and smaller side doors, and the vast spread of dead rose bushes clinging everywhere to the house itself, promising blooms and bees in the summer.

  This is Auden’s house.

  It’s the thought I haven’t let myself think, the dream I won’t let myself dream. The job and the money and all the arrangements were done through his lawyer; I haven’t spoken once to Auden himself. For all I know, I won’t see him here at all. Not ever.

  Which is good, that’s a good thing. Because I don’t care what he does or where he is, and he’s not the reason I’m here.

  My mother is.

  Flushing with shame that my first thought was of Auden and not of my mother, I force myself to remember the strange note. The convivificat that she wrote, the convivificat that found its way to me.

  This is what she would have seen, I think as we round the corner of the drive. The police knew from interviewing Thornchapel’s caretaker that she’d been here on Halloween morning the year she left us; she’d been seen heading for the maze. The caretaker tried to follow her, found the maze empty, and then decided she must have struck out for one of the public footpaths on the edge of the property, because maze or not, people didn’t just vanish.

  Unless of course, she’d taken the hidden steps at the center of the maze and gone to the thorn chapel, but I suspected he didn’t know about those. Or if he did, he considered them too secret even for the police. Even to save a woman’s life.

  Not that it mattered either way. The police found no trace of her here at all, not even after they tramped out to the silent ruins of the chapel.

  I’m not foolish enough to think I’ll find her here, or that I’ll find her at all . . . except, what if I could? Or at least, what if I could find out why?

  My father has always worried over my reckless hopefulness, my stubborn optimism, and he’s gently encouraged me more than once to accept that she’s dead . . . or at the very least, the kind of missing that doesn’t want to be found. And it’s not like I expect to succeed in finding her when so many police officers and the private detectives hired by my father have failed, but turning off the hope simply isn’t possible, even after all these years.

  Especially not after the convivificat.

  Even if she wasn’t the one to send it, even if someone else found it and then decided to mail it to me—it’s still something. It’s still worth building a little fire of hope under.

  Anyway, this isn’t how she would have seen the house on that last day, now that I think of it. She came on Halloween, when the trees would have been burning with autumn and the forest floor would have been carpeted with red and gold and orange. Leaves would have fluttered from the sky like rain, the climbing roses shedding ragged petals like tears.

  No, she wouldn�
��t have seen Thornchapel like I’m seeing it now—bare and barren. She wouldn’t have seen it dead, only dying.

  However, the house is actually anything but dead or dying—no matter how gloomy the bare rose canes and surrounding trees make it seem. This becomes very clear to me as we park, and I see several trucks and vans disgorging ladders and lumber and plastic pipes. Men in T-shirts, even in this cold, bustle in and out a side door with the industry of ants building an anthill.

  “What a place,” the cab driver says, opening my door before I can open it myself. “You really staying here?”

  “For now,” I answer as lightly as possible, secretly wondering what all this messy turmoil is. Auden’s lawyer didn’t mention anything about the house having work done—he only mentioned that I was welcome to live there while I worked for the Guest family. I accepted—it’s unusual, of course, but it will save money, and anyway, Thorncombe didn’t have any places available to rent. And if there had been a part of me that thought of Auden as I agreed, then I refused to admit it to myself at the time.

  “Modernizing,” the driver says wisely as we circle back to the trunk to get my bags. “Lots of these old places need it. Ah, it’s warmed up enough to rain now.”

  It has, just a few soft spits here and there. I glance back at the trucks, the dumpster at the side of the house with odd bits of wall and plumbing sticking out of it.

  The Thornchapel I remember had been modern enough—at least outside of the medieval rooms and the silent Long Gallery. There was running water and electricity, and televisions and an Xbox in Auden’s room, so if there’d been hunter green carpet and floral wallpaper elsewhere, my ten-year-old self hadn’t noticed enough to care.

  “I think the owner died,” I say in a tone of conversational speculation . . . though I know for a fact that Auden’s father is dead because the family lawyer told me as much. “It’s his son’s now. Maybe he wants to put his mark on it?”

  “Fixing it up to sell, more like.” The trunk slams down and the cab driver rolls both suitcases closer to me. “These places are damned hard to maintain.”

  Funny how that’s never occurred to me, that Thornchapel needs maintenance, that it needs roof repairs and masonry replacements and plumbing fixes and window sashes refitted. It’s always seemed like a place apart to me, a place alive, like a temple in a myth or a castle in a fairy tale. It just is, it just exists outside any human intervention, a rambling stone sentinel surrounded by trees at the front and sumptuous gardens at the back. Even now, watching workers carry in supplies and hearing the faint but distinct noises of power tools and hammering, it’s hard to believe this place is just a house and not the gorgeous, ancient gate to a mysterious chapel I only half remember.

  I tip the driver extra for helping with my bags—and also for braving the hair-raising country roads—and after a quick cheers, he gives me a creased business card from his coat pocket with the cab company number on it.

  “In case this place don’t work for you,” he says, giving me a small smile and then giving the house a doubtful look. Through his eyes, I can see how strange this all is. A chipper American girl about to live in a house that’s not hers for a job she only accepted ten days ago. He can’t know I’ve been dreaming of this place every night since I left, that in my mind this is the place that swallowed my mother whole. He can’t know that I’ve spent almost every day of my life since she left trying to find a way back here.

  “That’s very kind,” I say with an answering smile, which seems to reassure him. He gets in the car and leaves as I try to shove my wallet and things into my backpack, and after the car is swallowed by the trees and hedges on the way out, I pull out my phone and use the camera to make sure I don’t have mascara smeared on my face or anything. I took a flight from Kansas City to Minneapolis, from Minneapolis to London, then I took a train to Newton Abbot and battled carsickness for nearly an hour on the twisting roads—and all of that sitting on a welted ass because I couldn’t bear to face Thornchapel without one last kink scene with my ex-girlfriend.

  I haven’t properly slept in thirty-three hours, nor have I washed or changed my clothes, and the last thing I ate was a lukewarm sausage roll washed down with black coffee. I feel stale and strung-out, and I can’t even imagine how I look. Certainly not fit to meet Mr. Cremer, the Guest family’s lawyer.

  The front camera on my phone is never flattering, but it’s worse than usual today. My hair—dark, dark brown and falling past my breasts—needs a brush, and there is indeed mascara under my eyes from napping against my wadded-up cardigan. My complexion, which is the kind of translucent ivory-pink that shows every mark, bruise, and blush, betrays my exhaustion with bluish smudges under my eyes and cheeks splotchy from intermittent napping and the nipping wind. A glance down at my wrinkled dress confirms there’s no part of me that looks professional.

  I run a hand down the back of my thigh and suck in a breath as each welt and bruise sings a little song to me.

  I’m awake and alive, those songs remind me. I’m awake and everything is possible.

  Maybe I can slip in unnoticed and find a place to change.

  If I recall correctly, there was a bathroom off the main hallway on the ground floor, and if I went in through the same door all the workers are using . . .

  Mind made up, I slip my phone into my coat pocket, take hold of my suitcase handles, and start wheeling them through the side door—where I nearly run right into the firm chest of one of the workers.

  His hands fly to my shoulders in an instinctive gesture to steady me, and the automatic apology spills out of my mouth before I even fully realize what’s just happened. As a chronic daydreamer, I’m used to running into people . . . and doorways and light poles and walls . . . and so the hurried sorry! that spills out of me is one I’ve been practicing my entire life.

  “No, no, it was my fault,” the worker says in an accent that’s almost American, and I glance up at him, surprised at the sudden pang of homesickness I feel hearing it. Especially because it’s only been a day and a half since I left home.

  He looks down at me with ink-black eyes. Longish sable hair frames his angular face, and dark eyebrows, long eyelashes, and high cheekbones give way to a stubbled jaw and an oh-so-slightly cleft chin. And when his mouth parts again, I catch the glint of a silver bead on his lower lip. A barbell. It pierces the middle of his lip, emphasizing the softness of his mouth, the lush but firm lines of it.

  I shiver, even though I’m out of the wind.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, searching my face to make sure, and it’s as he’s examining me that I realize I’ve seen him before, that I know him somehow. It only takes me a second, and in that second, two things happen. Firstly, a cloud shifts ever so slightly outside and allows a patch of meager sunshine into the doorway, which means that I can see his eyes are actually a dark, dark brown, as is his hair. His skin is tinted bronze but paler than it was when we were children, like he’s known several rain-soaked years here in England since then.

  The second thing that happens is that he says my name. “Proserpina?” he whispers, his eyebrows drawn together.

  I bite my lip. “St. Sebastian?”

  St. Sebastian nods, looking a little stunned.

  “He goes by Saint now,” comes a long, elegant drawl from behind me.

  I shiver again because somehow I know, I just know, even though he wasn’t supposed to be here, even though I thought I’d never see him again.

  I turn, and I see the boy I’ve hated myself for loving for the last twelve years.

  Chapter 2

  Auden Guest is tall, like I guessed he would be, and handsome, like I knew he was. There’s the high cheeks and the square jaw hewn out of the promise of his boyhood prettiness, and a mouth that’s still a bit too exquisite for a grown man. There’s light brown hair that flops just so over his pale forehead, and hazel eyes that promise . . . well, that promise everything. Money and mystery and cruelty and all the pouty rich-boy things I’ve
spent years armoring myself against.

  And when he sees me, really sees me, he gives a wide, dimpled smile with white teeth and this fatally charming lift on one side of his upper lip—a human dash of asymmetry on an otherwise flawless face. Those hazel eyes make their lying promises under long eyelashes, and for a moment, I forget all my own promises, all the vows I made to myself back home before I came here.

  After all, it’s stupid enough that I never stopped thinking about the day we kissed, and it’s stupid enough that I spent the early part of my teenage years convinced we were soul mates. It’s stupid enough that my first stirring dreams and urges weren’t about celebrities or even boys in my own school, but about Auden . . . and St. Sebastian. And Rebecca and Delphine and Becket. I must have been the only one of us six who missed that summer, who wished we were all together again. Who wished for something more than friendship. Something profane.

  Anyway, I vowed to myself before I came here that I wouldn’t compound my stupidity by falling in love for real.

  Here’s the thing: I finished high school at sixteen and crossed the stage for my bachelor’s at twenty, crossed it again for my master’s just this year. I have a mother who taught me every myth she knew, I have a father who loves me, I have friends who like me and colleagues who respect me. And I am hopeful and reckless and curious, but I am not stupid.

  And I am not going to do something as stupid as fall in love with Auden Guest.

  All at once, my defenses are back, and I’m able to return his smile with a steady one of my own, even if my heart won’t slacken its frantic fluttering beat.

  God, I’m so tired. It hits me suddenly, like a heavy sack thrown over my shoulders, bending my knees and making my head droop. “Auden,” I say, the last syllable of his name breaking on a yawn.